Graceful, even elegant, and always eloquent tribute to men at arms in a war that, in a way, never ended.
An affecting memoir, by novelist/journalist Brady (The Marine, 2003, etc.), of service in what is still a strangely forgotten war.
The Korean War followed WWII, and it had no shortage of men willing to fight it; as Brady writes, “some of us went almost eagerly and with a certain dash, having missed the ‘Big War’ and feeling left out.” The young men who did officer training together at Quantico, Va., were a mixed bunch straight out of a WWII movie, but many had elevated pedigrees: there was Punch Sulzberger, for instance, who became publisher of the New York Times, along with future university provost Pete Soderbergh, whose son would become a movie director, and Washington Redskins quarterback Eddie LeBaron, and televangelist-in-the-making Pat Robertson. (Robertson’s father was a U.S. senator, “with sufficient political muscle that his son hinted that the brass would sort of look after him, which stirred resentment among fellow officers and led to tribulations of near biblical proportions for young Lieutenant Robertson.”) Off they went to war, and, fighting in the cold mountains of the two Koreas, many of them died, “raw meat on the end of a stick.” That, of course, is what Marines do, and Brady cautions that you won’t find many pacifists among their kind, though he has become a careful student of war and voices plain criticisms of the wars that have followed his. The present Brady, who is now in his late 70s, meets the younger one on a mission that must have been daunting: a journalistic assignment to revisit the places where he fought and where many of his friends died. His evocation of their lives and his lost youth is most moving, and so, too, are his notes on the passing of former comrades who lived through the war: “The Quantico class of ’51 wasn’t doing so well,” Brady mourns. “Life was closing in on us. Death was.”
Graceful, even elegant, and always eloquent tribute to men at arms in a war that, in a way, never ended.Pub Date: April 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33242-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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